Untenured Radical

Ivan Illich’s Deschooling Societyby Graeme Hunter

A friend notices a slim volume lying on my desk: Deschooling Society. “Ivan Illich!” he chuckles,
as if remembering some amusing old scallywag. “You don’t hear much
about him anymore.” My friend speaks in the tone of friendly bemusement
he would use if he had caught me listening to old Chubby Checker records.

I decide to play along. “I’m writing a review of Deschooling
Society for Touchstone,” I tell him. “Bit behind the wave,
aren’t you?” he flips back. Perhaps he’s right on both counts.
You really don’t hear much about Illich these days, and social criticism
of even the most trenchant kind may lose its kick three and a half decades on.

The fashionable pose to strike, if you remember Illich at all, would be the one
taken by Douglas Martin in the New York Times obituary (he died on December
2, 2002): call it smug superiority. Martin remembers him only for having “preached
counterintuitive sociology to a disquieted baby-boom generation.”

Incorrigible Schools

So generous of Martin to have noticed Illich’s passing at all, we are meant
to think, especially in so prestigious a publication! But Illich did not seem
so counterintuitive or irrelevant in the years following the publication of
Deschooling Society in 1970. In that book he put forth a radical critique
of public education that has yet to be wholly assimilated except by the most
countercultural of homeschoolers.

Illich may not have changed everyone’s habits in education, but he certainly
got their attention. He taught thousands of readers to see public education,
for the first time in their lives, as a problem rather than a solution: as a
system that consumes billions of dollars to yoke unwilling and often unteachable
pre-adults to licensed, but frequently unaccomplished, instructors, who practice
their dubious craft in glum, prison-like institutions.

Public schools are not merely defective; they are incorrigible. The very fact
that they are large, bureaucratic institutions makes them inimical to education
as Illich understood it.

What should we be doing instead? Education ought to become a system of “intellectual
matchmaking,” whereby anyone who wants to learn can be connected with someone
able to teach. The computer, Illich prophetically saw, is the ideal tool for
creating such a democratic and freewheeling—or in Illich’s preferred vocabulary “convivial”—possibility.

Even some of the more daring educational initiatives under discussion today are
clumsy and timid in comparison. The “voucher system,” for example,
in which education taxes are returned to parents in the form of credits to be
redeemed in the school of their choice, is considered by many to be a progressive
idea. Indeed, many of its critics find it altogether too progressive.

Yet 35 years ago Illich had already diagnosed its weakness, dismissively comparing
it to “giving a lame man a pair of crutches and stipulating that he use
them only if the ends are tied together.” Illich meant that though it may
be an improvement to be able to choose which school your child will attend, the
real calamity is that he is obliged to attend any school at all.

The “learning networks” Illich advocated would procure education
differently, putting it beyond the reach of government control. Such networks
would make a truly liberal education possible, an education that measured
its success by the ideas that were explored, rather than by the length of “an
enforced stay in the company of teachers.”

The aim of a student ought to be to achieve competence, Illich thought, not necessarily
to be awarded a diploma. His “radical alternative” to school would
be “a network or service which gave each man the same opportunity to share
his current concern with others motivated by the same concern.”

Incorrigible Institutions

Because I failed to appreciate the degree of his hostility to institutions, my
one and only conversation with Ivan Illich was a short one. I phoned to invite
him to be the keynote speaker at a conference to be entitled “The Future
of the University.” “The university has no future,” Illich
told me. And hung up.

I don’t know if I was the only admirer of Deschooling Society to
miss the importance of the wider critique of institutions at its core. It wouldn’t
surprise me because, looking back, I find it hard to see how I could have overlooked
it. At one point Illich said, for example, “Once we have learned to need
school, all our activities tend to take the shape of client relationships to
other specialized institutions. Once the self-taught man or woman has been discredited,
all non-professional activity is rendered suspect.”

Careless readers like me only gradually came to appreciate Illich’s wider
concerns as he fleshed them out in attacks on other kinds of institutions. Medicare
comes in for scrutiny in Medical Nemesis (1975), and the institutionalization
of work in such books as Tools for Conviviality (1973) and Shadow
Work (1981).

He had the right kind of credentials to get a hearing in the early seventies,
credentials that might easily count against him today. He had come from exotic
beginnings in Vienna, studied and been ordained a priest in Rome, gone from a
poor parish in New York in the 1950s to being the vice-rector of the Catholic
University at Ponce (Puerto Rico), yet without ever losing his interest in the
poor.

He would later found the Center for Intercultural Documentation (CIDOC) in Cuernevaca,
Mexico, to offer effective crash courses in Spanish to Catholic missionaries
to Latin America. That, at least, was its official business, but like every school
(and ironically CIDOC was nothing less), it taught important extracurricular
lessons as well. Missionaries learned not to identify with the culture they came
from, but to open themselves to the one to which they were going. Illich wanted
them to see real possibilities in lower-tech, more people-oriented societies.

Illich’s church superiors did not like the direction of his school, which
seemed to them to savor of “liberation theology.” The tension created
by that disagreement was one source of the alienation Illich began to feel from
the church.

Another was the issue of contraception that arose in the late 1960s. Illich felt
that the Catholic teaching was unsuited to the poor families of Puerto Rico,
with whom he was at that time still concerned. At first he tried to purchase
the right to dissent from Catholic teaching by declining to take any salary from
the church.

But such an arrangement could not last. After all, he was not challenging some
mainline Protestant denomination like the United Church of Canada, where doctrine
is always temporary and negotiable. When Illich recognized that neither he nor
the church was likely to change its position, he abandoned the priesthood altogether
in 1969.

Catholic Sin

But he did not abandon the church. He never stopped considering himself a Catholic
and even a Catholic theologian. But he made free to criticize the church with
the unrestricted scope of an outsider. His fascinating conversations with Canadian
journalist David Cayley, ultimately published under the title Corruption
of Christianity, make it clear that he assigned to Roman Catholicism the blame
for the original sin of institutionalization, out of which, he believed, our
fallen modern world arose.

In reading those conversations in preparation for writing this article, I (an
Anglican) was struck by how little Illich was temperamentally a son of the Roman
Catholic Church. He was Catholic only by the accident of birth. By nature, he
inclined to the anti-authoritarian outlook of the Reformation.

It is no surprise, therefore, that some of his sternest critics are Roman Catholics.
An Opus Dei publication of the seventies refers to him as “that strange,
devious and slippery personage, crawling with indefinable nationalities, who
is called, or claims to be called, Ivan Illich.”

One need not look to religion to find grounds for criticizing Illich. He had
the misfortune to be an intellectual in silly times, the turbulent and asinine
sixties, and some of the silliness rubbed off on him. The lofty opinion he professed
to have of those years was less than prophetic. Illich regarded the student movement
of the 1960s as a good thing in itself. He saw it as an authentic movement of
dissent founded on ideas, instead of, as was really the case, on a flight from
ideas.

He was also wrong in thinking that it would resist being drawn back to the corporate
and consumerist norm. In the consumer university of this new millennium, over
which aged hippies continue to preside, it is difficult to suppress a smile when
we read that “fewer and fewer can be reconverted by patience or co-opted
by subtlety—for instance by appointing them to teach their heresy.”

Deschooled Homeschoolers

When weighed in the balance, however, Illich is not, in my opinion, found wanting.
His critique of the institutionalized life that increasingly we are all expected
to lead, was an apt one. And Deschooling Society, in particular, made
a difference, because it was a foundational document for the movement of homeschooling,
surely the most promising educational development of the twentieth century.

School, Illich rightly saw, was “the reproductive organ of the consumer
society.” Early homeschoolers knew he was talking about them when he looked
forward to a generation that would grow up without obligatory schools and so
be able to forge a new and convivial alternative to the consumer society.

It would be good to give Illich the last word in this belated obituary and review.
Let him answer himself the charge of my friend who assumed that his words would
have no power after 35 years. I quote the opening of Deschooling Society,
and as I do, I try to imagine how many of today’s social critics, how many
of our “public intellectuals,” would be capable of similar cogency
and power:

Many students, especially those who are poor, intuitively know what the
schools do for them. They school them to confuse process and substance. Once
these become
blurred, a new logic is assumed: the more treatment there is, the better
are the results; or, escalation leads to success. The pupil is thereby “schooled” to
confuse teaching with learning, grade advancement with education, a diploma with
competence, and fluency with the ability to say something new. His imagination
is “schooled” to accept service in place of value. Medical treatment
is mistaken for health care, social work for the improvement of community
life, police protection for safety, military poise for national security,
the rat race
for productive work.

Graeme Hunter teaches philosophy at the University of Ottawa. He is the author of Radical Protestantism in Spinoza's Thought (Ashgate). He is a contributing editor for Touchstone.

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